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August 08, 2010
Great questions about email
(Sorry that I’ve been a little inconsistent with my blog posts lately; I’ve been busy working on my new HR communication book with my colleague Jane Shannon. The good news is we just sent the completed manuscript to the publisher. Whew!)
As you may know, I invest a lot of time learning about marketing, because I find that marketers spend their time trying to attract customers’ attention—so there is a lot we internal communicators can leverage from marketers.
I just read this fabulous Email Insider blog by Loren McDonald, which asks the great question, “Your Email Program: Time for a Tune-Up—Or a Blow-Up?” The idea is this: If you had to start your email program from scratch, would you run it the way you do today? (Another way to ask the question: Are you so focused on small improvements that you’re failing to step back and look at the entire program?)
The blog is aimed at marketers, of course, but many of the questions apply to using email to communicate to employees. Here are some to consider (which I’ve altered somewhat to make them more applicable to employee communication):
- What is the role of email in our company?
- Does the return we get on our regular broadcast emails justify the time and money we spend on them?
- Do we integrate email with other initiatives, including social, mobile, print, or broadcast?
- What are our company's business goals, and what role does email marketing play in achieving them?
- How do we best reach and engage our employee segments? What are their pain points, and does our email program address them?
- Is our program's frequency and cadence logical to employees, or do we need to move to a more customer-centric approach?
- Are we using the right metrics to measure and communicate email's ROI and value?
Consider these questions when thinking about how well your email program is working.
Posted by Alison Davis at August 8, 2010 04:42 AM
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